‘Images of refugees from a horrific civil war wandering into the background of Europeans’ holiday snaps have proven darkly fascinating.’
Photograph: Win McNamee/Getty Images

One hot afternoon this August, the peaceful waters of Vokaria Bay on the Greek island of Chios were disturbed by a jetski as it headed in a straight line for the shore. As well as the noise, swimmers noticed the passenger hanging on behind the driver. Instead of the usual loudly coloured beach shorts he was dressed in shirt sleeves and suit trousers.

Stepping off and thanking his driver, the man trudged up the pebbles to introduce himself to locals in flawless Greek. He was Syrian, he explained, and had studied at Athens law school two decades earlier before returning home where he went on to become a judge. Now in his mid-40s he had lost hope after four years of civil war and fearing for his life, decided to leave.

They have found Greeks who have their own reasons to feel hopeless and exhausted. They are in the sixth year of the deepest recession ever witnessed by a developed economy. After eight months of fractious negotiations, brinkmanship and all-night summits there has been no easing in the terms demanded by the rest of Europe for keeping debt-laden Greece afloat. The prescription of deepening austerity in return for the financial aid the country needs to finance its debts and remain in the euro is unchanged.

The foreseeable future is one of even greater unemployment, deeper recession and political instability. Alexis Tsipras, the man who became prime minister by insisting that Europe must address what he called a “humanitarian crisis” in Greece, has resigned. His hyperbole won him office, but nothing in the way of concessions from the eurozone. He now waits to see whether he will be re-elected on 20 September.

For Greeks weary of their own troubles there has been no summer hiding place from the scale of the influx

No one should doubt the severity of the Greek depression, arguably the worst peacetime crisis that a developed nation has faced. Its poisonous effects can be traced in everything from suicide rates and homelessness to child poverty and support for political extremes. But neither should they confuse it with what is unfolding in Syria or Iraq or Libya or Eritrea, whose people are also making for Europe. The displacement of half of Syria’s 22 million population amounts to the worst refugee crisis since the second world war. This is a humanitarian crisis.

One of the peculiarities of this August has been the alignment of these crises. High season for the Greeks themselves is usually stretched more leisurely over July and August. This year the imposition of capital controls and the fear of Grexit has shrunk it to a few weeks, leading to a crush even on the islands that receive fewer foreign tourists.

On islands closer to Athens, such as Tinos, where tourism is overwhelmingly Greek, high summer earnings are essential to survive the lean winters. It has left locals to bemoan a “relentless August”, which had the capacity to exhaust but not to fully compensate for weeks and months of income lost to political deadlock.

On the islands closest to Turkey, such as Chios, Samos, Kos and Lesbos, where 33,000 migrants have arrived in the last month alone, the two phenomena have played out simultaneously. In Chios Town, the island’s capital, Greeks queuing at cashpoints due to continuing caps on withdrawals, have watched far longer lines of refugees at the mobile phone stores, anxious to get a sim card and let loved ones know that they have survived the passage to Europe.

For Greeks weary of their own troubles there has been no summer hiding place from the scale of the influx. Inevitably, there are some who have taken advantage of the situation. On Chios, sharp operators have been going to the most popular landing sites and gathering up discarded lifejackets and the outboard engines from abandoned dinghies, which they then resell to smugglers across the water in Turkey.

Others, like the baker on Lesbos who signed on to feed a few hundred migrants on a government contract and has found himself months later unpaid and feeding more than 8,000 refugees have shown great patience. A handful of people such as Sandra Tsiligeridu and her friends, whose day trip to a small islet off Kos on a speedboat turned into a drama when they rescued a Syrian man who had been adrift in the water for 13 hours, have responded with great humanity.

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Meanwhile images of refugees from a horrific civil war wandering into the background of Europeans’ holiday snaps have proven darkly fascinating. In a sense, the juxtaposition of sunburnt tourists on loungers with sodden, desperate refugees arriving from Syria recalls some of the early images from the surge of piracy in 2008 off the coast of East Africa.

Then it was ragtag Somali pirates hijacking holiday yachts and stalking cruise ships that provided startling footage. Not that Syrian refugees pose any physical threat to anyone, but their arrival in such numbers is one of those jarring moments where the wreckage of failed states, civil wars and the sum of human misery penetrates the bubble in which much of the developed world lives.

The dividing line in people’s response to the human traffic is most often drawn between those who acknowledge the people on the move as refugees and those intent on grumbling about illegal immigrants.

For now the Eleftherios Venizelos, a passenger ferry named after Greece’s greatest statesman, has been pressed into service to transport undocumented foreigners from the islands to the mainland. It was Venizelos who as prime minister oversaw one of the world’s most harrowing population exchanges in 1922 in the wake of a disastrous war between Greece and Turkey that forced millions of people to abandon their homes and countries. Once again there are refugee ships crisscrossing the Aegean and anyone with a sense of history should stop calling it a migrant crisis.